Saturday, 19 October 2013

Death in Vienna

The
National Gallery’s new exhibition, Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna
1900,
is, on the surface, a look at the portraiture of the cultural centre of fin-de-siècle Mitteleuropa.

This
is not, though, a city of Strauss waltzes, but a haunting look at a clash of
old and modern, life and death, at Europe’s heart.

We
start with the mask of Beethoven’s face taken after his death in 1827.

The
cast is not the finest: so scared was he of poisoning that he insisted that his
demise should be followed by a postmortem. Both the damage done by that process
and by the time lapse between death and the casting mean that the ‘final
expression’ – the aim of a death mask – has been blurred.

Yet
still it retains power; a face pinched by pain or the fire that always consumed
the composer.

This
is all context: the absorption with death that becomes pronounced as we
encounter later works started long before the works that constitute the core of
this exhibition and before Freud, whose own work seems to hang over the
paintings.

Contextually
too, Beethoven was one of the fathers of German romanticism. Like the artists
of the Vienna Secession, whose work follows, Beethoven kicked down the old and
created a new artistic language.

The
Secession understood this and its 14th exhibition was dedicated to
the composer.

The
exhibition has left some critics grumbling about the context of that mask, and
about how the exhibition as a whole is arranged – in other words, not
chronologically. But this has benefits for the visitor.

For
instance, seeing Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 Portrait of Lotte Franzos hanging right next to
Hans Canon’s Girl with a Parrot from 1876, presents an unusual opportunity to grasp
what a shock the modern must have been to a public weaned on an art form that
was as constrained by convention as society itself.

We
move through rooms covering different themes, from initial context to the
family to Jewish identity in the city to death.

The Family (Self Portrait), Shiele

Although
Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Kokoschka are well represented here, the
exhibition has brought together work by a number of other artists, including
Jewish and female ones, to create a wider picture

The
presence of works by Teresa Ries (a self portrait of great self-confidence),
Broncia Koller and Elena Luksch-Makowsky all make the point that women were
involved at the highest levels of artist endeavour and were exhibiting as such.
It’s subsequently that they appear to have been largely forgotten.

But
death is a dominant theme here: so often the outcome as the modern and the old
collided; as anti-semitism rubbed against the flowering of secular Jewish
artists, intellectuals and businessmen; as Vienna became a magnet for émigrés
from central and eastern Europe; as liberalism collided with conservatism; as
people started to question religious conventions and social mores, and as
individualism warred with the subjugation of the id in the name of society and
family.

But
to begin with, there is death and convention.

Passing
through the rooms, we discover Friedrich von Amerling’s Antonie von Amerling
on her Deathbed from 1843, Franz Eybl’s The Artist Franz Wipplinger, Looking at a
Portrait of his Late Sister, from 1833, Gyula Benczúr’s Portrait of Empress
Elisabeth
from 1899 (painted a year after she was assassinated, and representing her some
40 years earlier, portrayed against a stunningly-realised background of gold)
and even Emperor Franz Joseph on his Deathbed, by Franz von Matsch from 1916.

There’s
work by Richard Gerstl, who killed himself when 25, after a short affair with
Schönberg’s wife, and was only later recognised as a seminal Austrian
Expressionist.

Of
the Klimt works, while two early ones are astonishing for their photographic
quality, the latter ones exhibited here all seem connected to death.

A
deathbed portrait of Ria Munk (1912), after she had shot herself in the heart,
aged 24, following an affair, sets the scene for one of two posthumous
portraits of her that is displayed here.

And
then a pastel of Klimt’s dead infant son, Otto Zimmermann, together with a
photograph of the child in a coffin.

Such
postmortem photographs were so popular in the Vienna of the time that the
government enacted a law banning the presence of corpses in photographic
studios.

Portrait
of Amalie Zuckerkandl was being worked on even as Austro-Hungrary itself was in
its death throes, and was unfinished when Klimt himself died in 1918.

As
if reflecting those ends, you look at this work and sense that you know where
Klimt’s characteristic gold would have gone, but while the spaces are there,
they remain ungilded.

But
death had not had its fill of this portrait: Zuckerkandl herself would later be
murdered in a Nazi death camp.

And
then there is Schiele.

Ah
yes: this notoriously ‘difficult’ artist.

The
Family (Self Portrait) dominates a room – light years away from the chocolate-box
sentiment of Alois Delug’s The Markl Family (1907) that hangs just a few
metres from it (another illustration of how effective the design of the exhibition
is in presenting stark contrasts).

Schiele’s
gaunt figures, blank-eyed, stripped almost of flesh and with brushstrokes that
could be the underlying muscles; angular, and devoid of what the artist
considered to be aesthetic hypocrisy, seem to be the perfect visual metaphors
for a Europe brutalised and shattered by the war that was finally grinding to
an exhausted halt.

Death mask of Gustav Mahler

Later,
there is Schiele’s Portrait of Edith Schiele, dying, from 1918 – just days
before his own death, also from the Spanish flu.

And
more death masks follow, like a frame of the exhibition: of Klimt, of Schiele,
of architect Adolf Loos and of the composer Gustav Mahler.

The
latter, made in 1911, is unusual in that it was cast by an artist, Carl Moll,
and includes much of Mahler’s head and neck as well as his face. The detail is
staggering: eyelashes and pores on the neck: it as though you are looking at
the composer himself, sleeping.

There
are aspects of this exhibition that seem full of life as opposed to death.

Moll’s
Self Portrait in his Study, from 1906, may on the surface be conventional, but it has
some interesting touches and is beautifully executed.

Gerstl’s
Portrait of Lieutenant Alois Gerstl (1907) seems to have something of
both van Gogh and Chagall about it.

Schiele’s
Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918) has the same blank look of The
Family (Self Portrait) from the same year, but his subject sits, utterly modern,
against a red and gold background that recalls to mind the icons of Orthodoxy.

There
are other patches of the gold that is so familiar in the work of the Secession,
as behind the head of the subject in Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta (1907), but also in
Isidor Kaufmann’s Young Rabbi (1910).

Anton
Romoko’s portraits of Isabella and Christoph Reisser from 1885 both hint at the
same thing in their blank backgrounds, while some of Kokoschka’s earlier
backgrounds do something similar, with their mix of reds and golds.

There’s
the discovery that Arnold Schönberg was not only the creator of the 12-tone
scale, but a painter of some note.

Works
by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from the pre-Secession era show, however, that
not every artist was trapped completely in conventionality.

Gerstl’s
Nude Self Portrait with Palette from 1908 (the year of his suicide) is striking too
– not least for its apparent prefiguring of Schiele’s angularising of the human
body.

And
the exhibition as a whole is fascinating because it offers the chance to see
how European artists outside France and Spain (Matisse and Picasso, in other
words) explored, dissected and made the anew.

If
I have a quibble, it is the odd way in which sex is treated – or rather: not.

It’s
skated around: mentions that Klimt fathered a number of children by several
mothers, and of painters and subjects and their affairs.

One
can, in Schiele’s 1912 Portrait of Erich Lederer (left), even see a harbinger of Weimar
androgyny.

Yet
Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta is the point at which the curator
chooses to inform of us that it is ‘different’ from other nudes of the era in
being ‘non-sexual’.

Which
is one interesting – not least, as, in our time, we seem increasingly to be
seeing any nude as sexual: see the moral panics that have been thrown up by
pictures of naked children being snatched by the police and the photographers
arrested, even when they are the parents.

Yet
there seems also in this an attempted rejection of the fact that human beings
are also sexual beings. However much some may try to pretend otherwise, we view
our fellow humans at least partially in terms of sex.

In
fin-de-siècle Vienna, as in so many other places and at other times when conventions
were being torn at, the rejection of sexual conformity was a vital part of
that. And in a Freudian world, and one where individuality is being explored
and old beliefs dumped, this seems even more the case.

In
Schiele’s oeuvre it’s impossible to miss this.

In
2007, at the Barbican’s Seduced: Art and sex from antiquity to now, works by both Schiele
and Klimt were included.

It’s
difficult to see how, for instance, Schiele’s Two Girls Embracing (1915) can be seen as
pornographic – the gaze from the two women is a challenge to the viewer as
voyeur. And Eros, from 1911, of a male nude with vast, erect penis and,
again, a challenging look at the observer, does not seem intended to arouse.

Perhaps,
rather, they confuse in their lack of shame, and the frankness and boldness of
that challenge.

But
if Nude Portrait of Marietta is a portrait, then so, surely, is Eros.

That
is, however, a relatively minor quibble.

If
you expect a Vienna of gaiety and Strauss, this may not be for you. But Facing
the Modern
is an intellectually challenging exhibition and one that brings great rewards
on that score. Gemma Blackshaw deserves great credit for her work on it.

And
it’s also an exhibition that will, I suspect, stay in the mind for a very long
time to come.

• Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900 is at the National Gallery, London, until 12 January. Find out more here.

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